Richard White once observed that Worster sought to place “environmental history at the point where the natural and the cultural intersect and interact with each other,” a scenario that in no way ignores technology.{3} Worster treated technology as an expression of culture, one that had steadily enlarged its power to reshape the earth. He did not view technology as an independent, driving force so much as a set of tools and techniques that magnified and accelerated the environmental impacts of human occupation rather than determining the path or nature of those impacts. Farmers thus were viewed as businessmen who turned to machines to maximize profits, often by ignoring the natural limits of a particular place.{4}

To Worster, capitalistic culture was the essential factor underpinning the Dust Bowl. By distorting human relationships with the land, capitalism made the aggressive employment of agricultural mechanization an irresistibly attractive option. Such farming practices exacerbated the destruction of the native sod that had evolved on the Great Plains, which in turn led to the devastating dust storms of the 1930s. In Worster’s view, science and technology had never represented the solution to such problems. Neither new and improved technologies nor increased scientific understanding of Great Plains ecology offered protection from the recurrence of similar environmental calamities, he warned, so long as capitalism’s values, norms, and priorities dominated. Capitalism trumps all other suits in Worster’s story. No talk of progress here. In fact, it is quite the reverse.{5}

Fig. 1 The federal government commissioned photographers to document the hardships and conflicts faced by farmers in the Dust Bowl. The original Farm Security Administration caption card for this 1938 Dorothea Lange photograph reads: “Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: ‘Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don’t get it out, I’ve got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again.’ Son: ‘It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father’s broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?’” (Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, reproduction number LC-USF34-018264-C.)

The roots of Worster’s work on this topic ran deep. He openly acknowledged his personal attachment to the southern plains—an expanse of grasslands spreading over 100 million wind-swept acres in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. The hardships associated with the Dust Bowl eventually drove his parents from the region. They perched temporarily in California—where Worster was born—before resettling in western Kansas as soon as conditions improved. Worster stated that the book’s origins sprang from a longing to revisit the plains, to “take another look at the land and people who gave me so much to start with” (p. vii). This emotional attraction to the subject did nothing to blur his vision or dull his critique, however. Indeed, he knowingly predicted that his conclusions would displease many plainsmen.

As a socially caused ecological calamity, the Dust Bowl has been surpassed in magnitude only twice in human history, according to Worster: by the Chinese in around 3000 b.c.e., when upland deforestation triggered centuries of severe flooding and silting, and later by the brazen overgrazing of Mediterranean vegetation that led to the erosion and impoverishment of this once quintessentially fertile territory.{6} In comparison to these earlier landscape degradations, which resulted from generations of human activity, the Dust Bowl occurred far more rapidly and could not “be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or social disorder.” As Worster explained:

It came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to. Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of “busting” and “breaking” the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work, others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately and self-consciously set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth. (p. 4)

Prior to Worster, few authors had drawn connections between the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s. He argued that these events were inextricably intertwined and that they revealed “fundamental weaknesses” in American culture, both ecological and economic. During the 1920s, the Great Plains had been “extensively plowed and put to wheat—turned into highly mechanized factory farms that produced unprecedented harvests. Plains operators, however, ignored all environmental limits in this enterprise, just as Wall Street ignored sharp practices and a top-heavy economy.” Perhaps in other, more forgiving ecological circumstances such agricultural practices might not have been so destructive, but on the southern plains there was little to buffer the impact of commercial farming on the course-grained soils, and little to prevent farmers from assuming the risks they were “willing to take for profit” (pp. 6–7). It was, Worster argued, “the work of man, not nature” that created the Dust Bowl.

Admittedly, nature had something to do with this disaster too. Without winds the soil would have stayed put, no matter how bare it was. Without drought, farmers would have had strong, healthy crops capable of checking the wind. But natural factors did not make the storms—they merely made them possible. The storms were mainly the result of stripping the landscape of its natural vegetation to such an extent that there was no defense against the dry winds, no sod to hold the sandy or powdery dirt. The sod had been destroyed to make farms to grow wheat to get cash. (p. 13)

Throughout much of the country’s mid-section, Worster noted, “great phalanxes of clanking, smoking machines [remade] the face of the earth,” grinding under its rural culture in the process (p. 58). Landowners who received federal agricultural assistance often purchased tractors and displaced their tenants. Despite the drought and depression, tractor ownership increased dramatically during the 1930s in the southern plains. Farm mechanization changed farming patterns and pushed people off the land.{7}

The ecological and geological history of the Great Plains owes much to the Rocky Mountains, which cast a vast rain-shadow over most of these lands and contributed to their immense flatness. As the mountain range’s rocks and soil gradually eroded, they formed an enormous alluvial fan that slowly obliterated the region’s topographical features under layer upon layer of sediment. The climate in this semiarid region was extreme and unpredictable. Rainfall averaged twenty inches or less per year. Worster explained that

[a]gainst these powerful forces organic nature had struggled over millions of years, determining by trial and error what would flourish best in this dry corner of the good earth—now losing ground, now gaining it back. Nothing was fixed or permanent; man did not come into a perfectly stable or finished world on the plains. . . . All the living things needed each other, depended on each other, to withstand the harsher side of climate. (p. 66)

The earliest human settlers understood and respected that interdependency. Their successors did neither. With periodic droughts a normal occurrence, grasses were among the few plants that possessed the resilience needed to survive under such conditions. Plowing those grasses on a scale measured in tens of millions of acres—a process begun in the late nineteenth century—was a recipe for disaster. It was an act that caused the sand-laced land literally to fall apart.

Comparing the development that took place between 1910 and 1930 to previous activities on the Great Plains, Worster observed how technology intensified society’s environmental impact. Cowboys and sod-house farmers of that earlier era had adopted traditional approaches: “herding animals by horseback, walking behind a plow and team.” As America embraced the success of “long assembly lines turning out automobiles, trucks, and tractors,” the grassland also “was to be torn up to make a vast wheat factory: a landscape tailored to the industrial age” (p. 87). The post–World War I recovery in Europe provided a huge financial incentive for wheat production in the southern plains. Millions of acres were planted in winter wheat, and the increased use of farm machinery drove down the per-acre labor requirements. Gasoline-powered tractors were the main transforming technologies, especially when coupled to the one-way disk plow, and they were complemented on the Great Plains by the combined harvester-thresher, or “combine,” as the innovative contraption was more commonly known.

The new machines cost money, and this raised the capital investments needed to farm. The new machines also allowed for economies of scale, an encouragement for farmers to invest even more in equipment and land. Speculators could move their specialized machines from field to field, becoming “suitcase farmers.” Technology, Worster wrote, “made possible, and common, an exploitative relationship with the earth: a bond that was strictly commercial, so that the land became nothing more than a form of capital that must be made to pay as much as possible” (p. 93). From 1925 to 1930, farmers plowed under 5,260,000 acres of native grasses in the southern plains. Without this indigenous vegetation in place when the drought and winds came, there was little to stop the earth from blowing in the wind. “When the black blizzards began to roll across the plains in 1935, one-third of the Dust Bowl region—33 million acres—lay naked, ungrassed, and vulnerable to the winds” (p. 94).

Today, few films are screened more frequently in history-of-technology courses than Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains.{8} Its argument that technology was the cause of the Dust Bowl and that technology—if redirected in the beneficent hands of the New Dealers—offered the best solution to the problem has drawn a sound rebuke from Worster: “Explaining the plow that broke the plains requires one to explain the powerful expansionary and autonomous thrust of American society” (p. 96). It is the cultural force of capitalism that truly explains this event, he insisted: “The attitude of capitalism—industrial and pre-industrial—toward the earth was imperial and commercial; none of its ruling values taught environmental humility, reverence, or restraint.” Especially on the southern plains, “where the grass had always struggled to hold the land against powerful winds and recurrent drought,” in a place situated—in Worster’s words—“on the edges of the fertile earth,” Americans seemed to find it most difficult to express “all the cooperative, self-effacing, cautious elements” needed to sustain the land (p. 97). “Living within the ecological order requires knowledge, of course, and appropriate technology,” he wrote, “but more important is the capacity to feel deeply the contours of that order and one’s part in it” (p. 164).

Responses to the dirt storms of the 1930s varied widely. The U.S. Department of Agriculture clung tenaciously to its longstanding goal of increasing crop production, particularly through the use of farm machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, improved seed, and irrigation. The pervasive belief that more was better hamstrung effective conservation-reform efforts, totally sidestepping the environmental limits of the Great Plains. Ecologists offered yet another perspective. Granting the unfeasibility of moving people off the southern plains, they urged that land use strive for a steady state (or, in today’s parlance, “sustainability”), which generally meant working to adapt oneself to local conditions. Reform spurred by ecologists was limited, however. They tended to provide ecological insights and then back off rather than propose solutions to alter human behavior on the Great Plains.

Agronomists formed a third group of New Deal conservationists. Led by the newly established Soil Conservation Service, they stressed the importance of farming methods, or technique. Accepting that their contribution would be to adhere to the prevailing political economy, which called for using land for cash crops, they attempted to persuade farmers to use the right tools to grow the right crops. The mantle of science helped strengthen their message. Unlike the ecologists, the agronomists contended that sod-busting was not the problem; the trouble rested with the subsequent agricultural practices, they said. The harrowing impacts of the Dust Bowl could be rectified, and the land made whole again, by technology. Echoing the conclusions of The Plow That Broke the Plains, the agronomists pushed “salvation through technique” and promised “recovery through scientific manipulation of the land” (p. 211). In the end, conservation agronomy proved to be the most popular of the reform alternatives, but like its competitors, it left untouched the underlying economic system.

As shown by subsequent events, the agronomists’ prescriptions for reworking the Great Plains brought little lasting protection. From 1954 to 1957, the rain stopped falling and the wind started blowing again, doing damage to a wider swath of land than in the 1930s—the result of having even more land under the plow. The results would have been worse than during the 1930s save for the fact that the rains returned. Technique was neither the solution nor the problem. The cause of the Dust Bowl, in Worster’s analysis, was the motivation of capitalistic farming: the quest for extracting as much profit from the land as possible. And the situation was aggravated by the government’s continual willingness to clean up the worst of the messes whenever they occurred. With such an economic formula, making more money requires taking more risks, and that has spelled trouble for semiarid regions like the southern plains where the land has continued to be perceived as a commodity. Government officials had “offered farmers a technological panacea for ecological destructiveness, when the root issue was motivation and values—a deeply entrenched economic ethos” (p. 229).

For historians of technology, Worster’s highlighting of the fundamental role of capitalism in creating “natural” disasters offers a framework for engaging the most notable of Melvin Kranzberg’s “laws”: that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”{9} At the micro-level, land use (and the use of technology to work the land) involves individual assessments of risk-taking, and these decisions can vary from person to person. On a macro-level, however, clearer patterns emerge, shaped by the overpowering currents of culture and the political economy, as was so painfully evident in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.{10}

Historians of technology have often been drawn to the social and political dimensions of their topics. It is worth recalling therefore the milieu within which Worster wrote Dust Bowl. The 1970s witnessed the coming of age of the environmental movement, with heightened knowledge of ecological problems and an insistence that society address them. The merging of political activism and the involvement of scientists helped raise awareness of the earth’s limits and the responsibility of nations around the world to adapt accordingly. Technology was frequently suggested as the cure-all for problems, with mixed results, as documented now by many historians. Themes such as these saturate Dust Bowl, offering lessons about understanding limits and about scrutinizing more carefully proposals for quick reform.{11}

History, Worster tells us, involves more than human society (of which technology and politics are parts). It also involves place: that context of the physical and biological world where stories unfold. Technology has shaped the contours of those stories, of course, but so too has nature. This insight, this truth, has been increasingly pursued by a range of scholars committed to examining the intersections of technological and environmental history, an effort spurred in part by Worster’s exemplary analyses.{12}

In Worster’s case, the history of place provides lessons also useful in interpreting the present condition of that same region. Since the severe drought of the 1950s, farmers on the southern plains have redoubled their reliance on technology to fend off the threat of future dust storms. They have done so largely through sophisticated irrigation projects fed by galaxies of efficient, deep-well pumps tapping into one of the world’s largest subterranean lakes, the Ogallala aquifer. This immense irrigation enterprise has nurtured crops that have anchored the soil, and advancements in water-conservation technologies (such as center-pivot sprinklers and drip irrigation systems) have greatly reduced the percentage of fossil groundwater lost to evaporation. Nevertheless, the Ogallala is being mined at rates vastly exceeding the meager pace of replenishment, which means that this vital and virtually nonrenewable resource is diminishing precipitously, making all but inevitable the reassertion of the region’s environmental limits on society.{13} Technology will surely be called upon to help forestall the forces of nature. As Donald Worster teaches us, the history of the region suggests that culture, money, human choices, and—above all—place will also play a role in directing the outcome.

{1} For a discussion of this trend among environmental historians, see Richard White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1115.

{2} Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979); the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, with an eleven-page afterword by Worster, was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. Worster’s influence in helping to revitalize Western history can be seen in such works as: Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence, Kan., 1991); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under a Western Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York, 1992); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence, Kan., 1994); and Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). For examples of Worster’s subsequent contributions to environmental history, see: Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York, 1992); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993); An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque, N.M., 1994); and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2001).

{3} White, “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning,” 1111.

{4} For a discussion of how Worster treated technology and human history in his later book, Under Western Skies, see Hal K. Rothman, “The Sky’s the Limit? Technology and the American West,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 168–73. For a survey of the historical literature on American agricultural technology, see Deborah Fitzgerald, “Beyond Tractors: The History of Technology in American Agriculture,” Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 114–26.

{5} For a comparison of the trajectory of Worster’s narrative with that of a more traditional account of the Dust Bowl, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1347–76.

{6} Jared M. Diamond’s best-selling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, 2005), drew widespread attention to the extent and diversity of human-created ecological calamities across history.

{7} Farm mechanization, soil exhaustion, and a depressed agricultural economy were already contributing to rural out-migration—even from the Great Plains—during the 1920s. See James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York, 1989) and Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York, 1999). For an engaging treatment of the struggles endured by those who remained on the southern plains during the “dirty 30s,” see Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Boston, 2006).

{8} The Plow That Broke the Plains and Pare Lorentz’s follow-up New Deal documentary, The River (1937), both included original scores by Virgil Thomson, and both came to be considered landmark documentaries. In January 2007, Naxos released a one-volume DVD (catalogue no. 2.110521) containing the two films, each of them featuring newly recorded soundtracks. For an insightful discussion of Lorentz’s work as well as how other photographers and filmmakers addressed the interactions of nature and technology on the Great Plains during the 1930s, see Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago, 2005). The Dust Bowl images most deeply seared into the American consciousness, of course, were created by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (New York, 1939), which was adapted the following year for the big screen by 20th Century Fox.

{9} Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’,” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 545.

{10} For thought-provoking essays commissioned by Technology and Culture (vol. 47, January 2006) on the natural/unnatural nature of these storms, see: Craig E. Colten, “The Rusting of the Chemical Corridor,” 95–101; Todd Shallat, “Holding Louisiana,” 102–7; and Carolyn Kolb, “Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse,” 108–11. See also Martin Reuss, “Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street,” Technology and Culture 47 (April 2006): 349–56. For a more sweeping assessment of the question in general, see Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{11} For Worster’s reflections on the nature and development of environmental history, including the significance of its emergence during the 1970s, see Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York, 1988), 289–308.

{12} For a survey of this literature, see Jeffrey K. Stine and Joel A. Tarr, “At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment,” Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 601–40.

{13} See John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 2000) and John Opie, “The Drought of 1988, the Global Warming Experiment, and Its Challenge to Irrigation in the Old Dust Bowl Region,” in A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History, ed. James E. Sherow (Albuquerque, N.M., 1998), 261–89. For an assessment of land use on the Great Plains based on county-level census data from 1870–2000 in which technology is credited with helping farmers maintain a general level of stability in this region, see Geoff Cunfer, On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment (College Station, Tex., 2005).

Dr. Stine is curator for environmental history and chair of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

Volume 48 Number 2 (April 2007) | Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology

More unsettling, though, was my publisher’s request to produce a new “post-Katrina” preface to my book. Ideally, she said, it should be in the sort of journalistic prose style that I use for my more popular writing. With New Orleans still under water, I quickly said yes, not really thinking through the implications. What resulted was an odd document, a hybrid between a short-form magazine essay and an introduction to a scholar’s book. I did my best. But I now realize that I came up wanting in important ways. What I created, I think, was far more a historical document, a chronicle of my views of unfolding news, than good history. I was stricken by reports coming out of New Orleans. I could not step back. Worse still, I was too naive to realize how caught up I was in the moment. I should have done what historians do when they don’t have ready answers for hard questions: read history.

In the aftermath of that experience, Technology and Culture kindly offered me the chance to write a review essay about the literature on urban disasters. What follows is my effort to do that. I have not tried to be comprehensive. Instead, I have chosen five books that I think might help readers understand Katrina: John McPhee’s Control of Nature, Craig Colten’s Unnatural Metropolis, Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear, Philip Fradkin’s The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906, and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella’s Resilient City.{1} Writing this essay has certainly allowed me to organize my own thinking on the subject. Unfortunately, I cannot go back and rewrite the preface to my book, which will have to stand on its own merits. What I can do is suggest how these books, read in concert, suggest precedents for the Katrina debacle, even for the leveling of great cities. Each documents an overreliance on technology, a belief in artifice’s ability to tame nature. This deep faith, no matter how misplaced, has permeated American history. And the consequences have been severe, with the bill yet again coming due in New Orleans. On the one hand, I find these authors’ insights somewhat hopeful; I am sustained by the idea that history can help us to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. But I cannot help but wonder how it is that we seem to have learned so little from our past.

New Orleans used to be a sort of American Amsterdam: romantic, architecturally alluring, and entirely dependent on flood-control technologies for its survival. Much of the city, as we learned during Hurricane Katrina, lies below sea level. A ring of artificial levees, likely now the nation’s most notorious public works, is the only thing keeping the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain from flowing downhill into it. This technological fix, even when it works, brings its own problems to a place that has a high water table and no natural drainage. Because of the levees’ growth through the years, it has become ever harder to get water out of New Orleans once it finds its way in. Every drop of rain must be pumped over the embankments. And so the city relies on even more technology: hundreds of miles of drainage canals and a network of huge pumps, a system designed to shunt excess water to the levees and then push it over the top. All of this artifice makes New Orleans one of the world’s most engineered landscapes, a remarkable example of human confidence that it is possible to “control nature.”

That pithy phrase belongs, of course, to John McPhee. The first of McPhee’s case studies in his 1989 collection The Control of Nature, “Atchafalaya,” is about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ battle to keep the Mississippi River from leaving its current channel for another route to the sea—a potential death blow for New Orleans, which would become a river city without its river.{2} McPhee notes that “for the Mississippi to make such a shift was completely natural” (p. 6). But nature could not be allowed to run its course in this case, because “in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature” (p. 6). More succinctly, McPhee concludes that “nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state” (p. 7). And so the state brought its vast resources to bear on the problem, building a structure that has kept the Mississippi flowing past New Orleans for nearly two decades since McPhee’s essay first appeared in the New Yorker. {3} This span is long beyond what the river would have wrought if left to its own designs. And thus we are left with a tragic irony: for McPhee, it seemed that the greatest threat facing New Orleans in the future was going to be too little water. Oops.

McPhee got that one wrong. But forgive him, because he was right and prescient about so many other things, particularly the politics of technology, the way in which applying artifice to complicated environmental dilemmas creates winners and losers, not to mention unintended consequences. He was equally right about the deep hubris (which some would call the real threat facing New Orleans) necessary to think it possible to domesticate something so wild as the Mississippi. In “Atchafalaya,” McPhee, as he always does, takes his readers on an extraordinary journey: up and down the lower Mississippi with Corps of Engineers officers, a crawfisherman, scholars, and environmental activists, characters almost too colorful to be true. It is a bumpy ride, because everyone wants something different from the river: high water or low, more saltwater incursion or less, some flooding or none at all. There are even some heretics who claim that controlling the river is, at best, a short-term proposition. McPhee clearly sympathizes. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Corps of Engineers show a kind of blank certitude about their mission. One general blusters: “The Corps of Engineers can make the Mississippi River go anywhere the Corps directs it to go” (p. 50). In the end, though, readers know that any victory against the river, and by extension against nature more broadly, will be fleeting. Nature always bats last. Or, as a river pilot puts it, “Nature has more time than we do” (p. 24). The book’s title, then, is suffused with irony. The control of nature is a costly illusion.

Craig Colten agrees. In An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature, he explores the city’s tortuous efforts to keep unwanted water out and reclaim the local wetlands, as well as other examples of the place trying to engineer itself out of harm’s way.{4} A renowned historical geographer and environmental historian, Colten acknowledges that this process has been driven by culture, politics, and economics. That said, he is an unashamed materialist, far more interested in what he calls the “environmental circumstances that city builders faced” (p. 5) in New Orleans than in anything else. For anyone interested in how New Orleans found itself under water for much of the fall of 2005, this book is essential.

Indeed, in the wake of Katrina it is hard not to approach An Unnatural Metropolis teleologically, as if Colten somehow knew that swaths of New Orleans would be destroyed the year his book appeared in print. Reading the past backward carries all manner of risks, not least presentism. Even worse is the tendency to miss small increments of change over time, subtleties that, better understood, might have recast our understanding of events. Assuming inevitability is both less elegant—we have no term of art for this mistake—and more damaging, as it leaves no room for contingency, the gold standard of current academic nuance. An Unnatural Metropolis is filled with small decisions made at the local level and based on inchoate reasoning or flawed logic, decisions that eventually made New Orleans more rather than less vulnerable. It is filled, in other words, with historical contingency along the road to disaster.

Colten begins with flood control. This is a sensible place to start, because without levees there could be no New Orleans. Actually, without commerce there would be no levees and therefore no New Orleans. The city is a product of imperial ambitions, dreams predicated on the notion that nature can be mastered. French, Spanish, and then American settlers, all entranced by booster myths, viewed the landscape of the Mississippi Valley and decided a city would thrive near the mouth of the continent’s greatest river system. The city would be a metropolitan entrepôt, poised to gather up the produce of a huge hinterland. Where New Orleans now sits, on relatively high ground blessed with connections to Lake Pontchartrain, seemed a more likely location for such an urban project than others in the area. That the place was a bit of a fixer-upper, in need of massive technological interventions to keep it going, was deemed a reasonable tradeoff. After all, the people living there would get rich. They could use some of their profits to tame the local environs, which otherwise would be chaos unbound. Colten subscribes to arguments made decades ago by Peirce Lewis, who called New Orleans “impossible but inevitable”—talk about pith.{5} And so it was that New Orleanians began building levees and trying to drain their city, becoming ever more reliant on technology to keep them safe and nature at bay.

An Unnatural Metropolis next features a chapter on regulating the urban environs, which is framed in terms of “nuisance” abatement: trash and sewage disposal, the quest for potable water, the location of cemeteries, and park planning (pp. 49–50). Again and again, the city pushed its nuisance landscapes away from the urban core. Municipal authorities never seemed to learn that they could not hide from their own filth. What was out of sight and mind one moment kept reappearing the next: rotting trash carried downstream on the river’s current, corpses uncovered by hard rain, yet another eyesore or hazard to be cast farther beyond the pale. At the same time, as with drainage, inadequate municipal financing made real reform difficult. Although this material is fascinating, it demonstrates how current events, far beyond any author’s control, can alter the reception of a book. Following Katrina, most readers, save for specialists, likely will view this chapter as little more than a bridge to the next two, fine-grained inquiries into questions of race, environmental inequalities, and urban space.

In a post-Katrina literary landscape, Colten really hits his stride in chapters 3 and 4, detailing the ways in which the poor and people of color, most often African Americans, typically occupied the lowest, worst-drained, and most-polluted land in New Orleans. For anyone paying attention to the Katrina debacle, this is not news. Colten, though, offers important historical context, noting that this turn of events coincided first with the era of Jim Crow and later with postwar white flight to suburbs made possible as drainage technologies finally improved. Here and elsewhere, Colten is leery of mistaking correlation for causation. He has no hard proof, no smoking gun indicating that white New Orleanians forced African Americans to occupy the low ground and then chose not to extend the city’s drainage apparatus to areas where black people lived. So he is extremely careful with his prose. For instance: “The lapse in sewer service to this low-lying, largely African-American district suggests that a Jim Crow mentality perhaps continued to prevent full engineering efficiency” (p. 97). Absent clear evidence, this is all that Colten offers, a passage typical of the book’s tone: measured and thoughtful, if not always as impassioned as readers shocked by images of Katrina might like.

Colten concludes his book first with threats and then whimsy. As New Orleans expanded, new flood dangers emerged, in part because the illusion that nature was under control had become so convincing. With the massive levees separating the city from the river and lake, and with the urban wetlands reclaimed, New Orleanians could forget the danger they faced. They had to scale the levee to catch a glimpse of the Mississippi; even now, the river roils its way to the Gulf of Mexico largely hidden from view. Stunned tourists in the French Quarter sometimes gazed up from their coffee and beignets in astonishment as a containership glided by, high above street level. But the danger was still there. Colten suggests that New Orleans became dependent on “structural methods” as other cities began embracing “land-use approaches to flood control” (p. 160). While other better-planned cities were starting to work with nature, New Orleans was still trying to control it. The results were predictably bad. For places like the Ninth Ward, a downpour usually meant flooding. And, Colten adds with eerie prescience, a serious hurricane could spell disaster for the lowest-lying areas of the city.

A final chapter details the halfhearted efforts to reintroduce wetlands in recent years. Born of a cultural climate in which to many New Orleanians nature no longer seemed a frontier awaiting conquest, these efforts nonetheless bemuse or frustrate Colten. New Orleans, once a city of swamps, had by the 1960s become a place whose only wetlands could be found on exhibit at the zoo. Additional preserves on the city’s boundaries also disappoint. They represent nature cleansed of its rough edges—hardly nature at all, but instead another tableau of progress in a city convinced that it controls its once-wild environs. The warnings that follow are haunting now, particularly when Colten takes off the gloves in his epilogue. Having drained the wetlands that used to provide reservoirs during floods, New Orleans had put itself in peril. In the event of a severe hurricane, “the city could find itself under water for months. Evacuation would face serious bottlenecks due to the limited number of escape routes across the water-logged terrain.” More chilling: “federal authorities might not be willing to make the investment necessary to save a city that cannot afford to save itself” (p. 191).

No matter how down on its luck the Crescent City may now be, compared to Mike Davis’s vision of Los Angeles, New Orleans remains the city that care forgot. For Davis, L.A.’s glass is not just half-empty, it has long since been shattered in an unfair bar fight and its shards used to wound some poor, unsuspecting passerby. Actually, it is not a glass at all, but a panoptic cylinder, manufactured by an oppressed proletariat and later deployed by urban elites to contain their city’s working classes. Or something like that. Kidding aside, Davis’s Ecology of Fear is an unrelenting neo-Marxist exposé, a polemic that might leave readers afraid to visit Los Angeles for fear of fires, mudslides, earthquakes, killer cougars, poisonous snakes, and flaming bunnies. (Seriously. If Davis is to be believed, the place is absolutely overrun by rabbits on fire.) Oh, and please don’t forget the tornadoes, which are more common in L.A. than in Oklahoma City—at least they are if one accepts Davis’s rather controversial statistics. Wide-ranging, funny, extraordinarily well-written, Ecology of Fear is a crazy quilt. It is often overstated, and tendentious in places. But it is also instructive. And once again, in the aftermath of Katrina, it has a new resonance and feels more timely than ever. Indeed, Davis predicted the carnage that the nation witnessed in New Orleans after the hurricane. He just thought that it would be another city, Los Angeles, that would be destroyed.

Beyond the critique of the way Davis treats evidence—as a rather more plastic substance than many scholars would like—the most damning thing that can be said about Ecology of Fear might also be the book’s greatest virtue: it is as scattered, fragmented, far-reaching, and diverse as Los Angeles itself. Chapters cover the city’s infamous disregard for public space, Southern California’s misunderstood and apparently deadly twisters, and mountain lions hunting humans along the edge-habitats that have been created by the city’s endless sprawl. Another chapter juxtaposes Malibu’s chaparral wildfire cycle with tenement blazes in the heart of downtown L.A., and another conducts a foray into literary studies to examine fictional accounts of Los Angeles’s demise. Finally, there is material that may or may not be about the Los Angeles riots (honestly, having read the book at least ten times, I’m still not entirely sure).

All of that said, Ecology of Fear’s fascinating thesis can be found in its fast-paced first chapter, “The Dialectic of Ordinary Disaster.” It is here that Davis makes his case that Los Angeles is a fraud—not a slice of paradise, blessed with endless summers and miles of lovely beaches, but a disaster just waiting to happen. In fact, calamity in LA is the norm rather than the exception. Even if the city’s elites have papered over this ugly truth with sunny propaganda, Davis explains that “for generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense” (p. 9). The result of this skirting of limits has been tragedy. And when disasters have struck in L.A., time after time those in power have shirked the culpability that Davis believes is rightly theirs by insisting that fickle nature is at fault. This notion of unnatural disasters predates Ted Steinberg’s similar insight, which lies at the core of his Acts of God.{6} Most recently, the idea that natural disasters are not always natural, that they sometimes are socially produced, has run throughout the best coverage of the Katrina tragedy, particularly as the media confronted its own shocked response to the chaos after the hurricane hit. When officials at all levels of government tried to hide behind the rhetoric of a “natural” disaster, they found a skeptical audience armed with reams of studies suggesting the mayhem had been caused by poor planning, an inadequate response, and a culture addicted to technology.

Davis makes four points about disasters that may be applicable throughout urban America. First, L.A. was settled during a period of relatively calm weather following an era of unusually high rainfall in the West. Consequently, assumptions about the city’s disaster future are flawed, based as they are on too narrow a temporal data set. Second, disasters are often products of feedback loops that are too complicated to predict or comprehend, rather than just an outgrowth of an immediately understood causal chain. In these cases, technologies intended to control nature sometimes exacerbate the problems they were designed to solve. Third, most people believe that technologies that may actually be worse than useless will keep them safe in the event of a catastrophe. Fourth, “disaster amnesia is a federally subsidized luxury” (p. 47). This quartet, when mingled in an unstable urban environment, makes for a dangerous cocktail. This is true in LA. And we can see how true it was in New Orleans, which now may be in the midst of a period of more intense storms than ever before in the city’s history, where the post-Katrina chaos was born of factors so complex that the real cause of the disaster may never be fully revealed, where people had misplaced faith in a drainage system and levees that failed them, and where the wealthiest citizens likely will rebuild with federal flood insurance bankrolling their efforts to forget.

Davis’s most compelling material is found in his chapter on fire, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Picking up where McPhee left off in another New Yorker essay that became the third chapter of The Control of Nature, Davis suggests that fire suppression in the mountains bordering Los Angeles is a fool’s errand.{7} Wildfires not only are part of a natural cycle; the longer vegetation grows between burns, the worse the eventual conflagration will be. Had Davis stopped there, he would have been writing in McPhee’s long shadow. Instead, he deepens the discussion by adding the case of apartment fires in inner-city buildings. Not as worried about the line between causation and correlation as Colten, Davis notes archly that the incidence of wild and urban fires in LA is statistically similar. From there, the two cases diverge: expensive cliff dwellings perched on the urban edge are protected by armies of firefighters; tenements burn with little attention from the city. Federal insurance provides seed money to movie stars who will rebuild mansions in the hills; immigrants in the city lose everything and move on. It’s a brutal story, filled with sarcastic asides. By the end of the book Los Angeles seems a cruel city, equal parts Sodom and Gomorrah, a place deserving of the fate that Davis is certain lurks in its near future. That nearly a decade has passed since Ecology of Fear was published and yet L.A. still stands might surprise readers of this book. Davis, one expects, would shake his head and say, “Just wait.”

Philip Fradkin may be angling to become Northern California’s answer to Mike Davis—ideally, one suspects, without the nasty controversies, but with the brisk sales, if you please. Fradkin’s caustic observations about San Francisco’s disaster history and pessimism about the city’s future match Davis’s views of Los Angeles, even if he lacks Davis’s flair for metaphor and creative juxtaposition. Fradkin also shares Davis’s grave doubts about efforts to control nature, particularly in a dynamic environment like San Francisco’s. If he does not quite see disaster as ordinary there, he remains certain that the next quake is coming. And that the city is not ready.

The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906 is one of a trio of new books about the San Francisco earthquake, all presumably released to capitalize on the hundredth anniversary (18 April 2006) of what Fradkin insists was the worst urban disaster in the nation’s history.{8} He dismisses the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which is sometimes awarded that mantle, as politically unimportant; so much for the six thousand people who died in the storm surge and the rise of Houston as a result of the carnage. Chicago’s 1871 fire was not even half as large as the blaze that followed the San Francisco quake, he notes, and he does not even mention the 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood, which is considered a contender in circles easily mesmerized by David McCullough’s stirring voice and print narration. Of course, such squabbles do not seem quite as interesting now that Katrina has taken the title outright, a bit of renown New Orleans surely can live without. When it comes to his thesis, though, Fradkin is less focused on scale, list-making notwithstanding, than on causation. He insists that the earthquake was not natural. Or rather, while the quake may have been natural—Fradkin seems willing to concede the point—the disaster was caused by people, elites who ignored well-known hazards embedded in the city’s accident-prone site and then collaborated with the media to keep the danger quiet. “San Franciscans, not the inanimate forces of nature, were primarily responsible for the extensive chaos, damage, injuries, and deaths in the great earthquake and firestorms of 1906” (p. xl). So important is the argument, familiar to readers of Colten, Davis, and McPhee, that it is the first line in Fradkin’s preface. Cut to the chase, indeed.

Fradkin spends half of his book describing the earthquake, whose gruesome particulars are already well known. Still, this exposition is gripping, if grim. Fradkin is a commendable researcher and a totally committed and capable social historian. He recovers the voices of a wide array of common people, allowing his varied subjects to speak for themselves. The text, consequently, can sometimes seem a bit like a parade of quotes. Overall, though, the effect is laudable, as even well-worn terrain like the intentional destruction of Chinatown feels fresh again, though the accompanying tone of righteous indignation can be tedious. Fradkin is also an excellent storyteller, keenly aware of the importance of engaging characters. Fortunately, he has no shortage of these. The book is peppered with colorful anecdotes, including the case of opera singer Enrico Caruso, whose presence in the earthquake and later escape from the ruins tells readers volumes about San Francisco’s Gilded Age culture.

The meat of the book, what’s new here, arrives in the second half, which concerns the disaster’s aftermath. It was then that “the rich and powerful . . . usurped the functions of government” (p. xl): first by having a citizens’ committee order looters (as fluidly defined here as they were in post-Katrina New Orleans) shot on sight; then by persecuting Asian Americans as part of a concerted Anglo land grab that may seem familiar to observers paying attention to the politics of rebuilding (or not rebuilding) parts of the Crescent City’s battered Ninth Ward; and finally by cooking the books to ensure that the rich did better than San Francisco’s common folk during the relief effort. Fradkin is also interested in the politics of reconstruction, particularly the ways that powerful California Progressives like James D. Phelan used the quake as justification for race baiting, which then brought them expanded power and popularity.

In the end, though, the most poignant part of a book that now lives in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina may be Fradkin’s lament for how little San Francisco learned from the tragedy. The city rose from ruin too quickly to implement proper planning, instead building on loose soil—so-called made land—and hushing up talk about the next major earthquake. Fradkin notes that the death toll, which is still unknown, would have been much higher had the temblor taken place during business hours. Most troubling, seismologists predict that the next major quake will happen soon, likely some time in the next three decades. Worse still, it will be centered in an urban region that is approximately twenty times larger than it was in 1906.

If you are looking for an antidote to the depressing fare typical of the disaster literature, pick up The Resilient City, a collection edited by Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella. These well-illustrated essays examine topics ranging from the aftermath of the recent terrorist attacks on Oklahoma City and Manhattan to the rebuilding of Washington following the British invasion in 1814, the rise of Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo from the rubble and ashes of World War II, and the reconstruction of Mexico City and Tangshan, China, following earthquakes. These and several other cases make up a “global tour of disaster and recovery”(p. 335). Despite all the included destruction, The Resilient City maintains an optimistic tone, in refreshing contrast to Davis and Fradkin. The book is also commendable for its vast geographic reach and long temporal arc, and for drawing from a variety of disciplines: Asia to North America, the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first, art history to urban studies. On the opposite side of the ledger, despite its remarkable sweep and recent publication, the book feels somewhat timebound, even anachronistic in places. This is a book written in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, and one has the sense that the editors and authors might now regret having used the destruction of the World Trade Center as their baseline for urban catastrophe.

The backdrop of 9/11 does not, however, undermine the book’s utility or its principal argument, which is that modern cities, no matter how severely they’ve been damaged, almost always have recovered. As Vale and Campanella put it: “Although cities have been destroyed throughout history—sacked, shaken, burned, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and poisoned—they have, in almost every case, risen again like the mythic phoenix” (p. 3). This is an upbeat point, at least in the context of disaster studies, and something New Orleanians might celebrate. But Vale and Campanella complicate their thesis by recognizing that observers must pay attention to the meaning of “recovery.” Does the word refer to a city’s return to its predisaster population, economic activity, or emotional stability? And who comes through the horror unscathed or able to move on most easily? Although these insights would be interesting enough on their own as we cope with our hurricane hangover, The Resilient City goes further, suggesting why cities recover from even the worst calamities: namely, that they are rebuilt because of their symbolic value, their economic centrality, and the influence of their citizens. In other words, the reconstruction of cities confers renewed legitimacy on governments, forestalls economic downturns, and placates a significant portion of the electorate. In sum, cities are rebuilt because it is politically expedient for those in power to rebuild them.

Thus it is that New Orleans’s future, which might at least briefly have seemed rather bright during stretches of The Resilient City, begins to appear cloudy again by the book’s end. Despite a full slate of examples of cities that have weathered episodes just as or even more destructive than Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans may have an even bigger problem, unrelated to technology or inclement weather. The city, unfortunately, makes a lousy symbol for those in power right now; it is a constant reminder of the state’s failure to secure the safety of its citizens. Nature, therefore, is no longer an enemy of the state along the lower Mississippi. Moreover, if rebuilding comes down to questions of power, New Orleans is in deep trouble. The city has lost population, economic clout, and even some of its cultural standing over the last two decades. Its port remains a crucial feature in the nation’s commercial landscape, and its food, music, and architecture, not to mention social complexities, are all foundations of the American scene. But the city was suffering long before Katrina battered and then drowned it. Sadly, New Orleans must now go to Washington with hat in hand in order to secure its future. The city needs federal funding to keep paying for technologies that purport to control nature. Without this money, and the artifice it buys, the city will die. There it is: New Orleans, once our Amsterdam, may become an American Atlantis, forgotten beneath the waves.

So, with the Gulf Coast cleanup ongoing—although in many parts of the region it has not even really started—people are looking for some way to envision a future for New Orleans and its hinterlands. The city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, and Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, have put together advisory panels comprising activists, experts, and muckety-mucks (who have been duly criticized for being too heavily weighted with muck). These people, we are told, will make the decisions that will lift New Orleans from its current prostrate state, wring the city out, and make it safer in the future. In doing so, they will have to face choices—a great many of which will be about technology and the environment—that boggle the mind. Most difficult, perhaps, will be the issue of which neighborhoods will be rebuilt and which will not. For the moment the committees are trying to punt; they have suggested allowing the market to make the choice for them. But if McPhee, Colten, Davis, Fradkin, Vale, and Campanella offer any single conclusion, it is this: disasters outmuscle not only the invisible hands of capitalism but also the finest technologies arrayed by flesh and blood to control nature. And if I have learned anything from the depressing spectacle of Katrina and its aftermath, it is this: in considering the present and the future, one should not forget the past. That may seem self-serving coming from a historian. It may also be a bit of a cliché. But Louisiana’s reconstruction committees could do far worse in thinking about their job than to consult the literature on cities, technology, and urban disasters.

{1}John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York, 1989); Craig Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, 2005); Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998); Philip Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley, Calif., 2005); and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella, eds., The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster (New York, 2005).

{2}The second chapter of The Control of Nature, “Cooling the Lava,” deals with a volcanic eruption in Iceland. In a classic scholar’s dodge, I will just say that it is beyond the scope of this essay. McPhee’s third chapter, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” will figure later in this review.

{3}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya,” New Yorker, 23 February 1987, 39–44.

{4}By way of full disclosure, I read Colten’s book in manuscript. I liked it then. I like it now. I have a blurb on the back jacket. If that seems like inside baseball, let me suggest that this essay is less an academic review than a rumination about nature, technology, and urban disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

{5}Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, 2003).

{6}Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York, 2000).

{7}John McPhee, “The Control of Nature: Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” pts. 1 and 2, New Yorker, 26 September 1988, 45–78, and 3 October 1988, 72–90; reprinted in The Control of Nature, 183–272.

{8}The others are Dennis Smith, San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires (New York, 2005), and Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York, 2005).

Ari Kelman is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award in 2004. His essays on Katrina and New Orleans have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, Slate, and a variety of other newspapers and academic publications.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Hurricane Katrina was natural. The disaster that hit New Orleans was not. No amount of rationalization, of posturing, of caviling about this or that interpretation can change that fact. The ruin of New Orleans resulted from human error and self-delusion, from hope that trumped reality. If one looks back over the years, the disaster unfolds like a Greek tragedy, inevitably, with periodic pain and horror, and with protagonists oblivious to warnings about coming catastrophe. The tragedy of New Orleans (and of many other areas of the Gulf Coast) is not a watershed in American history because of the devastation and suffering, as horrible as they were, but because once and for all it leaves us without so much as a fig leaf to cover human conceit. Now more than ever we recognize the arrogance implicit in the term “natural disaster.” Such disasters are rarely inevitable but involve questions of choice. Nature is not responsible. As Pogo Possum said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Almost daily, newspapers publish stories that suggest mistakes and miscalculations in constructing the defenses of New Orleans against floods and storm surges. In the months ahead, various teams of experts will bring forth reports that apportion blame and suggest remedies. In the deluge of ink it is easy to forget that this disaster had many antecedents, and historians have the special responsibility to provide context and perspective. One needn’t go far back into the past for material. Hurricane Audrey in 1957 killed 557 victims near St. Charles who had refused to evacuate. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 seriously damaged six thousand homes near the Port of New Orleans; deluged the Lower Ninth Ward with twelve feet of water, carrying away corpses and cars; and blocked the lower Mississippi with a hundred destroyed or grounded barges and dozens of other sunken obstructions.{2} Following Hurricane Camille in 1969, one Pass Christian newspaper publisher called the recovery effort “as colossal a snafu as I’ve ever seen in my life,” and an African-American leader in Biloxi said it was “a dehumanizing and degrading experience.” Politicians criticized the relief effort, especially the response of the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness, the forerunner of the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Even the Red Cross received criticism for giving less money to a black than to a white, even though both men had the same size families and the black man had a significantly lower income.{3}

Nor should that context be confined to hurricanes in the New Orleans region, or even to the United States. The parallels between Katrina and the 1953 storm-surge flood in he Netherlands are truly remarkable. The Dutch catastrophe killed 1,835 people, left 800 kilometers of dikes and 43,000 homes damaged, 3,000 homes destroyed, and 72,000 people evacuated. As with Katrina, lack of communication and coordination among various governmental and relief organizations added to the death toll, and lack of logistics support, especially helicopters, significantly hindered relief efforts. Perhaps the most surprising, in both the Netherlands in 1953 and in New Orleans in 2005 engineering plans existed that, had they been implemented, would have saved lives and property. Budgetary concerns prevented the implementation of the Dutch plan, while environmental and commercial concerns transformed the New Orleans plan prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers into something less expensive, less environmentally destructive, and less protective.{4}

In his essay elsewhere in this issue, Nil Disco contrasts the Dutch “water culture,” which dates back centuries and has been incorporated into a multitude of regional political structures, with a U.S. system that must handle far more diverse water issues, ranging from Western drought to Eastern floods. Despite some superficial similarities, the United States and the Netherlands have profoundly different political cultures. In the Netherlands following the 1953 flood, the federal government assumed more authority and the number of local water boards was drastically reduced. A similar increase of federal authority in the United States must overcome deeply held biases. Americans have distrusted “big government” from the earliest days of the Republic, and a system of governments within government, with separately defined powers, continues to challenge any notion of centralized administration. Both culture and the Constitution, then, thwart national water planning and, as the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort shows, can also obstruct efficient relief operations.

In the United States and the Netherlands neither flood problems nor their solutions are new. For a large flood control system, such as exists in New Orleans, engineers continue to stress structural defensive bulwarks, perhaps supplemented by nonstructural solutions such as raised floor levels, flood-proofed buildings, flood insurance, expanded wetlands, and improved warning systems. Environmentalists and natural scientists point out the dangers to ecological systems when gated structures interfere with water flow; the fishing industry warns about damage to various commercial fish species; and others sound the alarm about windfall profits falling to real estate agents and land developers as a consequence of land creation and increased flood protection. In Louisiana the debate is often loud, always predictable, and rarely easily resolved.

Social solutions in response to actual or potential economic or environmental degradation are equally controversial and again have a long pedigree. To give one example, in 1968, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert C. Weaver, testified in a joint House-Senate hearing during deliberations that eventually culminated in passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969.{5} Discussing the urban environment, Weaver recommended that the country “develop a national urban land policy, a policy that can serve to guide both public and private action”; “evolve—invent if necessary—metropolitan organizations to meet problems that cannot be handled between historic boundaries of local government”; “take the responsibility—on both a national and at the local level—of rebuilding our inner cities so that the environment is once again amenable to human life”; and “realize that we cannot attain a decent environment without social justice. I do not state this as a theory, but as a fact.” It hardly seems necessary to suggest that all these points remain relevant and especially for a city like New Orleans.

Although the Katrina disaster echoes earlier problems and solutions, its magnitude raises our sensibility to certain issues. Two questions, I suggest, are paramount: the appropriate federal interest in providing protection against floods and the appropriate level of risk to be applied to the design of flood control facilities. The question of federal interest is not the same as was raised a century ago, when conservative congressmen and presidents questioned whether the Constitution even permitted federal involvement in flood control. The courts long ago resolved that issue. Rather, the question now is, how can the federal government ensure that federal monies are used effectively and wisely to promote national benefits? To put it another way, at what point does the federal investment no longer make sense? Such questions are especially difficult when human life is at stake. The issue goes back at least to the 1808 Gallatin Plan, but has never been satisfactorily answered. After nearly two hundred years of water resources development and a hodgepodge of statutes and executive orders, the United States still has no institutional framework for developing nationwide, coherent, comprehensive water resources programs, including programs for flood control. Congress, not the bureaucracy or outside experts, remains the final arbiter.

In the case of Hurricane Katrina (as in other similar major catastrophes), Congress will receive reports and recommendations from many organizations, including the Army Corps of Engineers, but ultimately it alone will decide how many billions of dollars to give to Louisiana to restore and improve hurricane protection and evacuation facilities. Levee board members, state politicians, and transportation, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests have descended on Washington to plead their case. Out of this turmoil will emerge some sort of idea of the appropriate federal interest, or, to put it more parochially, how much the North Dakota farmer will have to pay for New Orleans floodwalls. Should that farmer, acting through his congressional representatives, be able to demand some sort of quid pro quo from the city of New Orleans for the use of his money? Should he, for instance, be able to demand that certain parts of the city be evacuated, or that all buildings within the city be flood proofed? Conversely, how much freedom should New Orleans residents relinquish in order to obtain federal money? Were New Orleans residents to give up land for levees, buildings for parks and marshland, savings accounts for flood insurance, and their architecture for flood-proofed buildings on stilts, they might decrease risk considerably, but at what cost? As the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky argued, “No risk may be the highest risk of all.”{6} Hardly any issue guarantees more debate with less prospect for resolution than the appropriate balance between public good and private freedom.

Cost sharing between federal agencies such as the Corps of Engineers and nonfederal agencies such as levee boards and towns complicates flood control planning.{7} Should the nonfederal interests have inadequate funds to cover their share of the costs—or should Congress refuse to appropriate the authorized federal share—the temptation is to keep the project alive by redesigning it to reduce its cost, which usually also means reducing its benefits. Congressional demands, bureaucratic attempts to avoid a declining workload, and the Corps’ desire to satisfy its nonfederal “partners” increase the pressure to find a solution. The Corps sometimes finds itself facing a choice between half a loaf and none at all—between constructing a project at less expense but with a greater risk of structural failure or insisting on an engineering solution that provides more protection for life and property but may not be built at all if Congress or local interests refuse to accept the additional costs. New Orleans hurricane protection offers an instructive case study.

The question of risk is tied to the issue of the appropriate federal interest. The measure of flood risk using probability analysis is a bit over a century old. In 1923 the California Department of Public Works plotted the probable frequency of floods occurring in 100 years for 140 rivers or groups of rivers within the state. For example, a ten-year flood would have a probable frequency of ten per hundred years. At first hydrologists used the term “California Method” to describe this approach. In 1930, engineering consultant Allen Hazen suggested that the term “one percent flood” be used instead of “hundred year flood.” The change clarified that a one percent chance existed that the flood would occur in any one year. Although many professional hydrologists supported Hazen’s proposal, terms such as “hundred-year flood” gained wide popularity and led to much misunderstanding among the public.

The danger to this entire approach—only really appreciated in the last couple of decades—is that it translates what Ed Constant, in his comment in the January issue of T&C, called “narratives about nature” into something that is negotiable through the manipulation of hydrographs and frequency curves. It allows for infinite tinkering with engineering skill, legislative appropriations, and scientific modeling to achieve the illusion of a relatively risk-free solution. In short, as Tom Hughes has suggested in his recent book Human-Built World, it furthers our faith in technological fixes. Politicians demand these fixes, and planners respond with a barrage of studies that provide much data but often conflicting and unhelpful conclusions. Still, the public assumes that it is protected. At the most recent American Historical Association Meeting in Philadelphia, I participated in a special panel on Hurricane Katrina. During the discussion that followed the panel presentations, a woman from New Orleans expressed surprise that there was any risk at all in living behind the massive levees the Corps has built along the Mississippi River. I guess I didn’t make her day when I assured her that there was.

Complex systems lower the level of predictability, and certainly the hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls surrounding and within the New Orleans metropolitan area qualify as a complex system. However, as Craig Colten and Barbara Allen remind us in their essays, the problem is not simply one of quantity—reducing flood water—but also of quality. Writing about the petrochemical industry along the Mississippi River and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, Colten and Allen raise issues that the geographer Gilbert White first identified during the New Deal. New flood control facilities invite industrial, commercial, and residential growth that results in greater damage when floodwalls and levees are breached. When chemical and petroleum processing plants are devastated, the water supply and the environment are degraded, threatening human life and health. All too often, the people most hurt are minorities who live close to some of the refineries and chemical plants. It is easy to predict that environmental justice will be one of the hardest issues to resolve as a new New Orleans emerges.

Craig Colten reminds us in his book The Unnatural Metropolis that geographers portray the human-environment interaction in two different ways: “Relations with positive outcomes define resources, while negative results constitute hazards.”{8} Yet most water bodies are both hazard and resource—shallow Lake Pontchartrain no less than the Mississippi River itself. Most of the time, the lake provides commercial fishing and public recreation. But when a hurricane churns up its waters and a surge threatens its levees and floodwalls, Lake Pontchartrain becomes a hazard of horrific proportions. Todd Shallat’s essay illuminates how this contest between hazard and resource has played out in New Orleans. Today, environmentalists—and many engineers—argue the necessity of restoring marshland to act as a buffer against storm surges, but it is not clear how to do this without causing financial hardship and dislocation. Shallat notes the spotty success of restoration research and wonders whether the Corps can undo its destruction of wetlands. Such attempts almost inevitably call for adaptive management, for periodically modifying operations in response to new challenges. Both time and costs are difficult to calculate, and cynics see natural scientists holding a bottomless tin cup into which Congress drops the national wealth. But recovering from Hurricane Katrina requires the restoration of both society and the environment. Adaptive management must address economic as well as natural forces in an attempt to provide equity, security, and stability to the human population while minimizing negative impacts on the environment. It won’t be easy, and it will be expensive.

However, Carolyn Kolb need not worry about the Corps of Engineers’ commitment to restoring the hurricane protection levees and floodwalls in New Orleans. Both the Chief of Engineers and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works have publicly committed the agency to restoring the structures to their pre-Katrina condition by this coming June.{9} Upgrades and improvements await further reports and congressional approval and authorization. Nor can I, writing as one who has traveled to New Orleans and seen some of the destruction as well as the beginnings of recovery, doubt that the city will survive and recover much of its vitality. In this, I differ from the pessimists—many of whom were in attendance at that AHA session I mentioned above—who question whether New Orleans will ever be able to restore its culture and uniqueness. The city may be smaller, but it will come back.

Finally, Ed Constant made one comment in his short piece that bears repeating: “What historians of technology might want to think about is how we think about what’s ours and what’s nature’s, why we conflate the two, and whether our tacit intuition that they are the same speaks more wisely than we know.” Amen to that, Ed, and I would add this: The more we know about nature the more inclined we are to try to change it. Every time we do invite disaster.

Epilogue: Bourbon Street, New Orleans, January 19, 2006, 8:30 p.m. The street is not so crowded as usual and some of the restaurants are still boarded up, but the strip clubs are open and people are drinking in the street. Souvenir shops display t-shirts that say “FEMA is a four letter word” and “FEMA is the other F-word”. Other t-shirts refer to the two “bitches” who almost destroyed the town—Katrina and Rita. The black humor masks both gloom and contempt. I doubt that New Orleans residents find the shirts as humorous as tourists do. Looking around, one cannot help but feel that the manufactured passion of Bourbon Street pales in comparison with the passion that lies just beyond. Still, fires, earthquakes, and floods often lead to a better understanding of nature’s command. In the end, the Greek dramatists, not Francis Bacon, had it right. Knowledge is not power. Reason is. To which Sophocles might have added more specifically: Remember that the affairs of the community are the affairs of all.

{1} See Melinda Deslatte, “Governor Unveils Plan for Levee District,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge), 26 January 2006. Deslatte notes that the New Orleans Levee Board operated “a police force, an airport, two marinas and a $47 million budget” in addition to its levee duties. There is now a plan to consolidate and professionalize Louisiana’s levee boards.

{2} Todd Shallat, “In the Wake of Hurricane Betsy,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh, 2000), 124.

{3} Robert Walters, “U.S. Disaster Aid Stirs A Storm of Criticism,” Washington Evening Star, 22 December 1969. See also, Martin Reuss, “Katrina: Historical Perspective Needed,” Public Works History 88 (winter 2006): 8.

{4} G. P. van de Ven, ed., Man-Made Lowlands: History of Water Management and Land Reclamation in the Netherlands, 4th ed. (Utrecht, 2004), 399–400; Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Oosterschelde Storm Surge Barrier: A Test Case for Dutch Water Technology, Management, and Politics,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002): 569–84.

{5} “Statement of Robert C. Weaver, Secretary, Department of Housing and Urban Development,” in U.S. Congress, Joint House-Senate Colloquium to Discuss a National Policy for the Environment: Hearing Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, and the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 17 July 1968, 19–22.

{6} Aaron Wildavsky, “No Risk Is the Highest Risk of All,” in Readings in Risk, ed.Theodore S. Glickman and Michael Gough (Washington, D.C., 1990), 121.

{7} In the nineteenth century, “flood prevention” was the preferred term. In the early twentieth century, the term of art was “flood control.” This term is still used, although the Corps of Engineers now favors the term “flood damage reduction.” Each term clearly marks increased engineering modesty. Since 1986, cost sharing on federal flood control projects has been required.

{8} Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, 2005), 17.

{9} Mark Schleifstein, “Prestorm Protection Promised by June: Congress Expected to Strengthen System,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 20 January 2006.

At the end of April 2006, Dr. Reuss retired from his position as senior historian in the Office of History, Headquarters, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He plans to remain active in water resources history and looks forward to completing his book on the history of hydrology in the United States. T&C asked for his reaction to the essays concerning Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that appeared in the January 2006 issue of the journal, and he replied with the essay that follows. The views expressed in it are his, and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Some years ago, when I was in graduate school at Northwestern University, we had a Friday noon seminar on aspects of science and technology. I recall one meeting that featured a paper on high-energy physics. One of the senior physicists, Arnold Siegert, who had been a student of Heisenberg’s, got into an argument with a charming but not overly reverent mathematician (whose name I regrettably don’t remember) about the physical interpretation of mathematical formalisms. It was the ancient quarrel about whose reality was better, the mathematicians’ Platonic idealism or the physicists’ experimental materialism. At issue was some particle-decay process with a probability of ten to the minus something or other, which, when translated, meant that it should occur approximately once every thirty or so billion years, or once in twice the believed age of the universe. Finally, the mathematician, in some exasperation, asked, “Arnold, what would you do if you observed this phenomenon?” There was a silence. Then Siegert replied, almost impishly, “Not tell anyone.” It’s a splendid stratagem for improbable events in subatomic physics, but it doesn’t scale well for hurricanes. Too big.

What’s striking about Hurricane Katrina is that, like the nuclear physicists, everybody knew it was going to happen—sooner or later. Certainly anyone who’d lived in New Orleans or in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast for very long knew. My grandmother was born and raised in New Orleans, in what’s now more hopefully than veridically called the Garden District, and I grew up with the folklore of the River and hurricanes. Later, when I was at Tulane, we lived in an apartment building that faced South Claiborne Avenue but backed up to the old Sugar Bowl. Between our building and the stadium were the university’s practice fields, five or six of them. On each side of each regulation 100-yard field were two or three gently contoured, sodded sumps, perhaps 30 yards long and 10 yards wide, maybe 4 or 5 feet deep, with a large drain at the bottom. When the cloudbursts came, which was often, the sumps would rapidly fill up. South Claiborne is about 60 yards wide at that spot, with two lanes in each direction separated by a broad grass esplanade, which covers one of the several major canals that drain New Orleans. From our sixth-floor apartment we could see the end of South Claiborne as it curved around, and we would watch for the pumps down there to come on. Sooner or later we’d see the smoke from the big diesel engines that drove the pumps, and pretty soon the water in the sumps would go down, usually in only ten or fifteen minutes. When it was later rather than sooner, there wasn’t much mystery about what would happen if it were ever never.

I also remember one blurry morning sitting in Jackson Square, as gentle night gave way to merciless day, watching the strippers go home, tired and flat-footed. I had one of those “what’s wrong with this picture?” moments as it dawned on me that the hull of the freighter I was looking up at was visible above the top of the levee. We clambered across the railroad tracks behind the old Jax brewery (in those less troubled days the night watchman only fussed at us a little) and up onto the levee. Sure enough, the river stage was a good 20 or 25 feet higher than where I’d been sitting in Jackson Square.

The river levees at New Orleans are challenged, severely, at least once a year, usually more often, and the powers that be have quite rationally devoted the most attention to them.{1} The rest of the city is protected too, but driving around in the then recently built subdivisions out by City Park and Lakefront Airport, on Lake Pontchartrain, it was pretty obvious what the consequences would be if the northeast quadrant of a “perfect storm” got into Chandeleur and Mississippi Sounds: a massive storm surge would be driven through Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchartrain, and then into New Orleans. Sooner or later.

Some years later, I drove over to Old River, where the Red River, the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya come together, about 300 river miles above New Orleans. Old River Control, so memorably portrayed in John McPhee’s Control of Nature, is a set of massive spillways, a gargantuan navigation lock, and now a hydroelectric power station (then under construction) that together regulate the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. The entire complex was nearly obliterated in the great 1973 flood. The basic problem is that the River—the Mississippi, anthropomorphized since the beginning of time—“wants” to go down the Atchafalaya; the distance to the Gulf is about one-third, and the gradient is twice as steep. We don’t want it to.

I stood on the lock structure, at least half a mile long, talking to the solitary lock-tender, a native Cajun. The lock was so big—to admit the huge tows that pass between the rivers—that he used an old Schwinn bicycle to commute between the gate-control houses at either end of it. We were talking about the River and what had happened in 1973. I noticed a big island off to the northwest and asked if it were Turnbull Island, allowing that my granddaddy had logged it in 1910. That and the fact that I’d said “Turnbull” correctly (think about how Creedence Clearwater Revival says “turnin’” or “burnin’” in “Proud Mary”—it’s a pronunciation unique to about four parishes in central Louisiana) put him at ease. I wasn’t some outsider come to make trouble, dinky little foreign car or not, but a near-native, come home to talk about the River. We chatted for a while, and I finally asked him straight out whether he thought the works at Old River would hold. He laughed and said something to the effect that the River had been doing what it wanted for a lot longer than we had been trying to control it, and “sooner or later . . . .” I asked what he was going to do when it happened. He laughed again and, pointing to where he stood on the massive concrete lock structure, said, “I’m gonna come right here. It’s the highest point in eight parishes.”

What’s curious about these little vignettes is that they’re all implicitly cast as narratives about nature, when they’re really as much about what Tom Hughes calls “the human built world.” We do live on a restless, if not malevolent, planet, whose dynamics we barely grasp. But we also do stupid things. Short-run avarice always trumps long-run prudence, and so we build taxpayer-insured houses on barrier islands and in known floodplains. Our interventions have unintended, if not unforeseeable, consequences. The land inside the levees, along the rivers, is higher now than the land outside, which the levees ostensibly protect, as the land outside, deprived of sediment, slowly subsides.

These vignettes also have something else in common: an attitude toward certainties of very low probability. It’s not bravado or fatalism; too melodramatic. And it’s not a “form of life” or “a life world”; too highfalutin. It’s just there. People in New Orleans and south Louisiana know about the River and about hurricanes the way people in other places know about earthquakes or volcanoes or mudslides or the lethal build-up of carbon dioxide in deep lakes. It’s part of natural-born culture, like the way “ur” is pronounced in four parishes in Louisiana. It doesn’t diminish the human (and animal) tragedy of a Katrina to say that everybody knew. What historians of technology might want to think about is how we think about what’s ours and what’s nature’s, why we conflate the two, and whether our tacit intuition that they are the same speaks more wisely than we know.

{1}Rational in this sense: The expected value of a probabilistic bad event is its probability times its cost. A risk portfolio comprises the sum of the risks’ expected values. If resources can be applied to reduce probabilities or ameliorate costs, the value of the entire portfolio (total risk) is minimized when the marginal decrement in expected value per dollar spent is equal for all risks. Thus, assuming it’s immaterial whether New Orleans is flooded by the river or by a storm surge, it is rational to expend disproportionate resources to combat the more likely risk, which is river flooding.

Ironically, publicly funded flood-control measures more often than not have contradictory results. Usually they are undertaken explicitly as economic development initiatives and, if successful, as in New Orleans’ eastern wards, increase the cost of a disaster at the same time they putatively reduce its probability. Thus expected value is little improved. Moreover, implementation of this rationalist risk-management strategy assumes perfect knowledge and perfect foresight (known probabilities and costs), which is usually transmogrified into the assumption that the future will be pretty much like the past. Thus economics, that allegedly most rigorous of social-science disciplines, routinely makes an assumption that few if any professional historians would defend unequivocally.

Edward Constant taught history of technology at Carnegie-Mellon University, and is a native of Louisiana.

©2006 by the Society for the History of Technology.